AltSpaceVR held it's final official Good Bye gathering on Thursday, August 3rd as they announced on July 27th that they had run out of money and their investors decided to not invest any more. News of AltSpaceVR's closing rippled throughout the VR...
Dance is all about bodies moving through space, and it's something that shows the strength of the VR medium since there's something that's lost when it's translated onto a 2D screen. Lily Baldwin observed how audience members heard the music...
Decentraland is a virtual world that is using the Ethereum Blockchain to sell plots of virtual real estate. They're having an initial coin offering for the ERC-20 token MANA from August 8 to August 16, 2017, and they'll have up to 2 million plots of...
The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell after he had a mystical experience on the way back from being the sixth man to walk on the moon. After finding a description of his spiritual awakening experience as...
One of the unique affordances of virtual reality is it's power to convey the vastness of scale, which can invoke feelings of awe. Denise Quesnel is a graduate student at Simon Frasier University's iSpace Lab, and she has been studying the process of...
Ida Benedetto is an experiential designer who has developed a framework she calls 'Patterns of Transformation: Designing Sex, Death, and Survival in the 21st Century. She started curating Trespass Adventures, which were private & exclusive one-off...
Dustin Chertoff has pulled experiential design insights from the advertising world to come up with a more holistic theory of presence in virtual reality. In 2008, he was in graduate school and was dissatisfied with the major theories of VR presence...
VR Presence researcher Mel Slater is fascinated by what makes the medium of virtual reality unique and different from other communications mediums. He says that VR activates our sensorimotor contingencies in a way that fools our brain that we're...
Mel Slater's Theory of Presence includes two major components including the Place Illusion (the degree to which you're transported to another world), and the Plausibility Illusion (the degree to which you believe what's happening in that world is...
Nick Ochoa curated some of the top artists producing work entirely in VR for the Magik Gallery show that happened in San Francisco, CA on May 20th. It was an ambitious effort to introduce VR creation tools for artists within a fine arts context in...
Virtual Reality Headsets have not sold as many units as some of the more optimistic analysts have predicted, and VR Fund's Tipatat Chennavasin says that the relatively quick adoption of smart phone technologies have spoiled a lot of people within...
In March 2016, Oculus announced their Oculus Launchpad program with the idea that in order for VR to be successful, then there needs to be a diverse range of content created from diverse set of creators who are informed by different ethnicities...
There was an amazing projection mapped, immersive theater piece at Sundance this year by Heartcorps called 'Riders of the Storyboard.' Trained street performers interacted with a virtual projection-mapped 2D objects, and through the slight of hand...
VR World NYC is a new VR arcade that opened on June 24th in New York City right next to the Empire State Building. They have three floors with 55 different VR experiences, and they're using an all-you-eat buffet business model of paying $39-$49 to...
The process of diagnosing a concussion is largely a subjective process of variations of attention, focus, and balance, which means that the existing self-reporting methods are unreliable and easily gamed. Using foundational research from military...
Oculus premiered about a dozen games ahead of GDC this year, and one that stood out to me was Mage's Tale dungeon crawler for it's distinct art style and passion in using VR to fulfill childhood fantasies of becoming a spell-casting magician. Mage's...
My favorite narrative VR piece that I've seen so far this year is Rose Colored by Adam Cosco that premiered at VRLA. It's a science fiction morality tale that is asking us to look at a potential future of immersive technology. I'm cautious to say...
Sprint Vector is an 'adrenaline platformer' racing game that relies upon a unique locomotion technique of swinging your arms in order to run through an obstacle course. It's the latest game from Raw Data developer Survios, but with a much more light...
AxonVR was awarded US Patent No. 9,652,037 of a 'whole-body human-computer interface' on May 16th, which includes an external exoskeleton as well as a generalized haptic display made out of microfluidic technology. I had a chance to demo AxonVR's...
Augmented Reality has played a huge role at the developer conferences for Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google, which is a great sign that the industry is moving towards spatially-aware computing. Microsoft is the only company to start with head...
There's an invisible cyber war that's happening between major nation states, and Zero Days VR takes you inside of it in a completely new way using virtual reality. You go on a journey into a hyper-stylized cyberspace world where you embody the...
Funomena's Woorld won the best AR experience at the recent Google Play awards. You scan your room with a Google Tango-enabled phone, and then you're encouraged to decorate your space with extremely cute art and characters designed by Katamari's...
Testimony is one of the most profound and powerful applications of virtual reality that I've seen so far. It's an experimental documentary that captures the stories of sexual assault from five women broken up into five segments. You're completely...
Kyle Russell is on the deal & research team for Andreessen Horowitz (aka A16z) where he's focusing on investing in technologies ranging from virtual & augmented reality, artificial intelligence, drones, and other exponential technologies like...
Google's mission to organize all of the world's information, and so it's a natural fit for Google to be one of the leading innovators for using VR for immersive education. Google Expeditions was born out of a hackathon soon after the Google Carboard...
Mozilla's mission statement is to ensure that the Internet remains a global public resource, open and accessible to all, and they've been helping bring VR to the web for the past three years. A-Frame is an open source framework that has gained a lot...
Google's mission is to organize the world's information, and so they've been long-time advocates for the open web. At Google I/O last week, they announced that they'll soon be shipping Google Chrome for Android with WebVR, and that they're going to...
Cory Doctorow's new sci-fi book 'Walkaway' is a optimistic disaster novel that imagines what society might look like if people walked away from competitive market-driven laws, norms, and technological infrastructure and into an open-source inspired...
The HoloLens is the most impressive augmented reality HMD on the market today, and their developer kit is already being deployed into production in industries ranging from architecture, engineering, design, sales, medicine, and education. Microsoft...
The Microsoft Build conference starts this week, and I expect that we'll be learning more about the HoloLens as well as Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality operating system. Microsoft has been evangelizing about virtual reality the past couple of...
Philip Rosedale has been thinking deeply about how to architect large-scale, distributed virtual worlds after experiencing many bottlenecks in running Second Life. High Fidelity is taking a much more distributed approach with how it's being...
Eric Matzner identifies as a Techno-Optimistic Futurist who sometimes works an entire second workday within VR exploring different ways to expand his mind. He's pushing the limits of mental presence by using nootropic supplements for cognitive...
The keynote from Unity's Vision VR/AR Summit yesterday showcased just how far Unity is reaching into non-gaming content when it comes to augmented and virtual reality. The person who is in charge of Unity's xR strategy is Tony Parisi, who is a co...
UploadVR opened up their new 20,000 square foot Upload LA co-working space on April 13, 2017. I had a chance to catch up with co-founders Taylor Freeman and Will Mason as VRLA to get the inside scoop. Mason told me that opening up this huge co...
The Tribeca Film Festival featured over 30 different VR experiences within their Storyscapes and Immersive Virtual Arcade, and I had a chance to catch up with curator Loren Hammonds about some of the highlights of the festival program with genres...
Mark Pesce is a VR pioneer who has been thinking about networked virtual and augmented reality for over 20 years now. He developed the Ono-Sendai Sega VR helmet prototype, co-created VRML, and presented his Cyberspace Protocol spec at the first Web...
Back in 2015, Neuroscientist David Eagleman gave a TED talk about the potential to expand and create new senses. He showed off a haptic vest prototype that could translate audio input into an array of 32 vibrating motors that could be fed directly...
At Sundance this year, I had a chance to catch up with a couple of representatives from Google to talk about what's happening on the YouTube VR platform with 360 videos. I talked with Jamie Byrne, YouTube's Director of Global Creator & Enterprise...
One of the most immersive flying experiences that I've had a chance to have so far was Mindride Airflow. I had a chance to try it out last fall at VRLA, and the weightless harness combined with a variety of different wind speeds gave me a deep sense...
Shooting a bow and arrow in VR is a satisfying game mechanic. It uses both hands in a 6-DoF interaction that can only happen in VR. VR Unicorns' #Archery takes this bow and arrow shooting mechanic to the logical extreme in a quirky fashion that's...
April 4th was the one-year anniversary of the HTC Vive, and HTC released the subscription service for Viveport for $6.99 to try out five new VR applications per month. I had a chance to catch up with Viveport president Rikard Steiber at GDC to talk...
Shari Frilot started the New Frontier at Sundance in 2007, and programmed the festival's first VR experience in 2012 with Nonny de la Peña's Hunger in LA using an early Oculus Rift prototype made by Palmer Luckey. Frilot has since programmed around...
I had the chance to give the keynote at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference where I provide some historical context for virtual reality tracing the evolution of communications mediums in order to contextualize my elemental theory of...
I had a chance to catch up with Oculus' Nate Mitchell at GDC where I asked him about privacy in VR. Oculus has delegated the design and maintenance of their privacy policy to their parent company of Facebook so that Oculus can focus on providing the...
The developers at Harmonix didn't set out to create an open-ended music creativity tool with Rock Band VR, but once they realized how compelling it was to simulate the feeling of being a rock star on stage in VR, then they completely pivoted the...
Advanced Brain Monitoring is a 17-year old neurotechnology company that has been able to extract a lot of really useful information from EEG data. They've developed specific EEG Metrics for drowsiness, inducing flow states, engagement, stress...
I recently attended the Experiential Technology Conference where there were a lot of companies looking at how to use biometric data to get insights into health & wellness, education for cognitive enhancement, and market research. Over the next...
When I was at the GDC VR Mixer, Jim Preston struck up a conversation about his concerns about privacy in VR. He works at the VR eye tracking company of FOVE, but wanted to speak to me on his own behalf about some of the deeper philosophical...
I believe that the principle of Embodied Cognition is probably one of the most significant and important concepts to understand about virtual reality. Cognitive science researchers have been connecting the dots the importance of our bodies when it...
The eye tracking company Tobii had some VR demos that they were showing on the GDC Expo Hall floor as well as within Valve's booth. They were primarily focusing on the new user interaction paradigms that are made available by using eye gazing to...